Then There Were Three: Magna/GAZ, Fiat and RHJ Submit Bids for Opel at Deadline

Next week will be a very busy time for GM. The General has just over one week to meet its own bankruptcy deadline, but the deadline set by the German government to submit bids for Opel expired last night. The race is down to Fiat, Magna/Gaz and Belgian investment firm RHJ. Who will win is anyone's guess.

"Fiat has more than a 50% chance of pulling off its bid for Opel," Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne told the Agnelli Family, which founded and owns a controlling interest in Fiat, according to Agnelli-owned newspaper La Stampa. "At the end of the day, ours is the only offer that has real content and makes industrial sense. The others either do not have productive clout or are basically financial and we have seen with Cerberus, the investment fund that controlled Chrysler, just how weak such solutions can be."

While Marchionne is as confident as ever, he may not have just cause for his optimism. German magazine Der Spiegel reported on its website today that it obtained an internal ranking of the bids from a GM source and that the Magna/GAZ bid was ranked highest, followed by RHJ, with Fiat last. Anonymous sources told the magazine that GM has reservations about awarding the deal to Fiat as the company is also partnered with GM's rival Chrysler in the U.S.

The General isn't the only one reportedly worried about a Fiat tie-up. Opel's labor unions expressed concern when Fiat initially expressed its interest in Opel, and their fears were intensified when a supposedly leaked internal report from Fiat surfaced calling for factories to be shuttered and jobs to be lost. German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported today that Opel's unions have put together a last-ditch rescue plan should GM and the government reject all of the other bids for the company. Fiat denies the existence of the report and another German newspaper, Frankfurter Rundschau, reported that anonymous sources had revealed that Marchionne was willing to guarantee the survival of all Opel plants for the time being.

"Maybe the unions like them (the other contenders) because they reckon they can have an influence over certain managers who are expert only in finance and not in industry," Marchionne said, according to La Stampa.

Opel, like parent company GM, is on state-funded life-support until a buyer can be found. German state bank KfW and four German states agreed on Tuesday to provide the company with 1.5 billion in loans until a deal is completed and the German government has indicated that, if the U.S. agrees, it will shield Opel from GM's creditors until a deal is made if GM enters bankruptcy protection next month. In such an event, Opel's assets would be given to a trustee and provided with financing until a deal is completed. The German government said a delegation is ready to travel to the U.S. to discuss the plan with the Obama Administration. Germany's rescue plans for Opel are also being met with resistance from members of the German government concerned about throwing money at a failing automaker, a similar battle to the one that played out in the U.S. Congress last year. While GM will choose the buyer for Opel, the German government will have a great deal of influence as it has provided GM with a good deal of loans and further financing is contingent on the completion of the sale. Opel is based in Germany and has several factories and roughly 25,000 employees there.

"Our preference is for the investor that most credibly guarantees the four German plants and the most number of jobs," German Foreign Finance Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told German newspaper General Anzeiger.